Don't Panic
by Sayakami
Summary: Clara Whiteridge. Muggle, aspiring historian, eleven years old, the result of a mayfly romance...and a werewolf? She's still trying and failing to get used to the last part. And magic, for that matter.


A vaguely girl-shaped smudge wandered the hallways, draped in a Spiderman duvet that clashed with her periwinkle pajama shirt, cursing quietly. Her dark hair made her hard to make out in the shadows the dank old house naturally possessed. If anyone was wandering the hallway of the house, they would have smacked right into her; she took up most of the thin strip of walking room herself, and the bulky bedcover covering her like a cloak certainly didn't help.

After a veritable eternity of sluggish walking, the girl arrived to her destination; a completely empty living room. Literally.

She and her family, a grandmother and an impossibly annoying eight-year-old brat of a brother, had only just moved in yesterday; the boxes upon boxes of items were being stored in her grandmother's de facto bedroom. Her duvet doubled as a bed, since that was not in the house yet, and she had needed to bunch up one of the corner and use it as a pillow the night before. Of course she insisted on unpacking a few shirts and a pair of trousers or two, but she had quickly changed her mind when she saw the mothball-infested wardrobe. Wardrobes were all well and good when you were using them to get to Narnia, but otherwise they just smelled. She would probably be wearing her pajamas for the remainder of the week.

She shed her Spiderman blanket and dropped it onto the hardwood floor. This was the first time she had lived in a house that had wooden flooring. She wiggled her toes, willing the spot where she was currently standing to warm up. When this didn't work, she stumbled blindly into the kitchen and turned on a flickering electric light, which threw her features into greater relief.

She was a dark-skinned girl of about eleven years of age, with black hair in a plait and heavy-lidded eyes, which were squeezed shut. Strands of hair poked out from every angle like someone had rubbed a balloon on her head; visible evidence of the uncomfortable sleep she had had last night.

She wriggled her toes again, this time on cold, white linoleum. She opened her eyes almost fully, then closed them again with an unladylike grunt. Without a second thought, she turned the light off again. She'd go at this sightless. The light was too much for her poor, sleepless brain at the moment.

She shuffled over to the pantry and peered inside, having to stand on tiptoe to examine its contents. There was a neighborly gift her Gran had gotten from the family next door; a homemade loaf of bread. There was also a box of….well, it looked as if it might be cereal. She couldn't tell in the dark.

She grabbed the box and shook it; the noise it made sounded vaguely like a box of cornflakes, so she reached to put it on the counter. Total miss. It landed on the floor with a crunchy rushing noise that could only be cornflakes breaking in two. Cringing, she turned toward the way she had entered, expecting him at any moment…

Her little brother, Mickey, never showed up. Odd. He usually was the first to greet her when she woke up.

Electing not to look a gift horse in the mouth, she hurriedly retrieved the cornflakes and found what felt like a bowl to dump them in.

She opened the fridge and silently prayed, hoping that there would at least be milk. When she opened the fridge, she also opened her eyes, squinting even against the filmy light from its weak bulb. She could barely make out a Mason jar of some sort of jam, and a jug of milk.

Cheered by this small success, she hurriedly added the milk to her cereal bowl, and sat at a patio table to eat. Why the table was inside, she didn't know. She chewed thoughtfully in silence for a while, and steadily her brain unfogged and her eyes felt ready to open. Flicking the living room's light switch and expecting the worst, she was surprised to see that the lighting for the entire room was just as bad (if not worse) than the bulb for the fridge. She would have to fix that in the coming days here.

Overall, Clara Whiteridge, new resident of the Salisbury House, had enjoyed a relatively normal breakfast that day. She usually ate in the dark like this, as she often slept in until five o'clock during the weekends. She had figured it was somewhere around four right then, a usual waking-up time for her. She had a slight pinched look to her features, from accidentally skipping so many meals.

Picking unconcernedly at her chipping polished nails, she glanced at the grandfather clock, the exact kind of wood it was made of a mystery because of the dank lighting of the room.

Ten o'clock in the morning.

Clara Whiteridge had woken up at _ten o'clock_. By her account, this was a skeleton shift, an ungodly hour to wake up, a time she only managed to see way back when she owned an alarm clock.

That could mean only one thing.

It meant today must be a day for doing things, a day that meant something. A day where she'd need more than her usual 3 hours of daylight to accomplish a task.

She could hardly wait.

Picking up her cereal bowl one-handed, she tossed it into a sink that could only be described as decrepit, and searched the room for a scrap of paper to write a going-out note on. Not finding one but having her mind too clouded by the thought of things to do, she decided to set off without one.

She ran on quiet, bare feet back to her room and put on one of the few outfits that had made their way out of the box; a sweater the color of pumpkin peel, and khakis she had outgrown two years ago. She was too pumped-up to notice or care. She couldn't for the life of her find a respectable pair of shoes, so she tripled up on socks and hoped she wouldn't step in any doggie droppings.

Clara, of course, already had a destination in mind, and that was to find a store and buy some decent food. With any luck, she could make a nice breakfast for the rest of the Whiteridge family. Always, without fail, she had to have some sort of goal to work towards, or she'd go half insane trying to find one. She had already composed a mental list of things to do around the Salisbury House; replace refrigerator light, replace living room light, unpack boxes, find textbooks…

Unlocking the front door with a heavy key, and she was stepping on feathers…

Taking the porch steps, and she was tickled pink….

Two steps down the walkway, and she was getting a niggling feeling something was wrong…

A few more steps, and a hand on the clasp for the iron gate, and she was definitely feeling stupid, though she couldn't for the life of her figure out why…

And before Clara had the chance to undo the gate, she was completely awake, and finally realized why her head felt as full as the pantry.

Exactly how did she expect to find a grocery store just through random wandering? She didn't even have any money on her, so how in the world did she expect to buy enough food to make breakfast for two? _And for the love of all things holy, what was she wearing?_

Clara's hand slowly fell back to her side, only to be lifted up seconds later and slapped firmly to her forehead.

"It's quite a change to see you awake at this hour," a voice said.

Clara turned to see her grandmother sitting on a marble bench about five yards away from her standing point. A book was in the woman's delicately wrinkled hands, and she looked sternly at Clara through elegant spectacles.

It was Clara's opinion that her grandmother was one of the most beautiful women she had ever met. And though some might agree with her, the fact of the matter was that her grandmother simply wasn't a conventional beauty, if a beauty at all.

The woman had hair that alternated from lye soap white to dark gray-black, and each curl was carefully pinned to the top of her head. The face said hair framed had full yet prim lips, berry red with lipstick. The eyes on said face were a deep blue-gray, stamped with wrinkles like crow's feet at the corner of each lid. And the way the woman dressed, she could hop up and go to a funeral any time she wanted and not look out of place.

It was hardly everyone's thought of beauty, but in Clara's mind stately elegance beat out liveliness and spunk every time.

"I was surprised myself," she admitted, backing away from the gate with false nonchalance so as to not give her guardian the idea that she was sneaking off.

Her grandmother had already turned back to her thick tome, but she still replied. "Go out and mingle, Clara. Young ladies like you need social activity and physical exercise, especially at this age."

Clara, who was more average than smart, barely understood this, but still nodded. She looked regretfully down at her garish clothing, but unlocked the gate and traipsed outside anyway. It wasn't like she was going to bump into the prime minister.

"Right. I'll be…elsewhere," she said, and set off outside.

"Be back at a reasonable time for your lesson," her grandmother called.

_It's Saturday,_ the homeschooled child wanted to protest, but kept her argument strictly internal.

She wandered aimlessly for what must have been at least an hour, lost in thought.

Clara's mother and father had fell in love at a young age, and had a child at around the same time. That child was her, naturally. But her mother was flighty and scared and much too young to raise a daughter, so she had the baby and bid her lover a tearful farewell, out to make her way in the world or whatever it was adults did. Her father, having had Clara shoved off on him, in turn shoved her off onto his mother. She took the childrearing job with surprising dignity, though Clara often opined to herself that she had to have at least given her son a good slap around the ear. Clara's brother, however, was a different story. He wasn't related to her what-so-ever; her grandmother had agreed to look after him for a close (and obviously younger) friend, and said friend never picked him back up. Clara counted herself extremely lucky.

Also, in a surprising turn of events, her mother kept in touch with her through letters. Her birth mother's self-effacing and demure personality leaked through each letter. She had even sent Clara a picture once, when she had asked. Her mother had pale skin, a shock of short, blonde hair and the same heavy-lidded eyes she did. A feature of her mother she didn't have, but wished she did, had to be those elegantly arched eyebrows. She'd lost the picture, but didn't particularly care. She could remember a face well enough.

In all honesty, Clara didn't feel abandoned in the least bit. She was just glad she didn't have to stay in an orphanage, and her grandmother loved her and took wonderful care of her. Her father sent her gifts on her birthday, too, though oddly never a letter. The gifts were often clothing or books, specifically on the Tudor family, one of Clara's favorite subjects; she considered herself a young history buff.

What got Clara set to thinking about her biological family was one simple thing: she couldn't argue with her grandmother, for fear of starting a serious row. She couldn't banter with her grandmother, for fear of accidentally offending her. She couldn't play childish games with her grandmother, for fear of being thought of as a stupid kid. She honestly wanted a friend above all else, though she didn't see it that way. She saw it as wanting a different guardian, one with an easier personality. Clara wasn't _about_ friends. Clara Whiteridge was a girl of thoughts, of internal jokes, of plans and things and aimless wanderings. Alone was her middle name, and it fit her like a winter mitten.

A chill ran down her spine, and she looked around. She was at a small playground, the grass dry as bone under her bare feet. She didn't know when she'd removed her socks, but she certainly had. Her brain often went into autopilot mode like this.

"Curiouser and curiouser," Clara laughed, and then adopted a serious expression, hoping no one had heard her joking to herself. She stepped into the sandbox, feeling it's grittiness between her toes. She almost wanted to make a castle, but there wasn't a plastic bucket or shovel to be found. She frowned. There wasn't much of anything to be found.

There was a thick smudge of green forest directly to her left, and an oddly-located outhouse farther away to the right. But, there was no one there. She couldn't even hear the rush of cars on the road, or even the caw of a bird. It was suffocatingly silent. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and her heart knocked one harsh beat against her rib cage, but she easily quelled her fear.

_It's too early for people to be out and about, anyway, _she thought. _And besides, now I have the whole place to myself._ She chose to get a better look at her surroundings, which had been a mistake. The chained lengths for the swings were rusted, the monkey bars looked like a lawsuit waiting to happen, and she finally noticed that the sand under her feet felt decidedly wet. Disgusted, she removed them and slipped back on her three pairs of socks. Looking up at the sky, she noticed with a start that it was _beyond _dark. The moon was a cheery, full disc of light among the blackness of the sky.

_I think it's time to leave. Gran is bound to be going postal right now. _

And then, she was knocked to the ground by a yellow blur.

Seeing stars, she scrambled to push whatever was on top of her off, and managed it easily. As soon as she could get up, she stumbled backwards, pointing a warning hand at the yellow blur, as if it would help. Her heartbeat ran wild. A dog barked somewhere in the distance, though it sounded more like a baying wolf.

The blur wasn't a blur anymore; it was a girl not a few years older than her. She saw the yellow she'd noticed at first was in fact a garish yellow sweater, not much different from her own. It was obvious she had been running, by the way she was panting.

"What—?" Clara began, but the girl launched herself upright, pushed Clara back over, and bolted off like a lemon-colored lightning strike.

Clara barely registered how rude that was. Barely being the key word. _First girl I meet here, and she pushes me into the dirt. I'm sure the same thing would have happened if we'd talked, though. Just metaphorically. _

She tried to brush it off as if it was nothing, but her chest had an inexplicable tightness in it and the playground suddenly started to scream _wrong. _ She stood dumbly, unsure of what to do.

The howl of a dog somewhere nearby scared her out of a reverie, and she remembered the family waiting for her at home. By then, though, it was too late.

Clara was wrenched to the ground by some strong force she couldn't see, and she heard a nasty crack. Her mind was blank for a few seconds, but then she registered the worst pain she had ever felt. Her mouth opened wide, but she didn't cry out; not until she was dragged by her likely broken leg over the edge of the sandbox and into the sand. She kept saying, "Ouch! Cut it out!" but she knew whatever had her wouldn't be listening, nor would it even register what she was saying. The only other clichéd saying she had left to say was, "This isn't funny!", but she barely got the first word out before a heavy hand came down on her chest, leaving her breathless and winded.

Opening the eyes she'd clenched shut in pain, Clara looked into the eyes of the largest wolf she had ever seen, television or otherwise. She registered nothing but the hand—which she now knew to be a paw—that constricted her breathing.

_No way,_ she thought, and the last emotion she felt before white teeth ripped into her flesh and she blacked out was surprise at still being able to think straight.

**A/N: Short first chapter I typed out in barely an hour, because I had an idea and it wouldn't stop bugging me. And yes, Clara is biracial. **


End file.
